


Drabbles - Angel

by lycomingst



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-30
Updated: 2009-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-05 12:44:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lycomingst/pseuds/lycomingst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This a collection of unrelated drabbles featuring Angel. Most were written for the "Open on Sunday" LJ community.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drabbles - Angel

**Everybody's Friend**

There'd been the Shanshu and the final banishment of his demon. Angel hadn't remembered that humans had demons, too. Not sharp-toothed, bumpy-faced, but strong ones nevertheless. They whispered, cajoled, tempted. Not about evil, bloody and epic, but about greed, laziness and letting things slide.

So the fight continued. To be an everyday hero. To do his best at any given moment, like a human. It was wearying work as the long years went by.

Eventually, he met a friend he always knew he'd see again. Angel, like all old men, is regretful and relieved to see Death come for him.

**Falling**

Sunrise and sunset were the only manifestations of the natural world that mattered to him. So no matter that this was a place where even nature ignored the seasons. He'd adjusted his wardrobe.

He was following a schoolgirl. He was clean. Sober. The girl walked with purpose and certainly. He tracks her, maybe wondering if each new phase of his existence started with him playing hide and seek with a blonde.

He'd been lost for so long. Descending, sinking. Now he trails in the wake of a warrior heart. He thinks this might end in a different kind of falling.

 

**On Top of Everything Else**

He'd had one day as a human and it was perfect. He'd felt his heart beat, made hours of love to the woman he adored, eaten ice cream, felt the sunshine on his face.

And he'd given it all back. All the pleasures of the flesh. With some regret, but he knew it was his atonement and his duty. Why was everything he did never enough? How broad did the Powers That Be think his back was, that they could allow this one more misery to burden him.

"Ahhh…chooo"

One day as a human and he catches a damn cold.

 

**Doubt**

A small doubt lurked in the mind of the newly-turned Angelus. With eternity before him, perhaps, after the newness wore off, after he'd seen all the glittering capitals and dark alleys the world had to offer, perhaps he'd be bored.

He soon found humans could be relied upon to entertain him. The way they harrowed and abused each other was gratifying and instructive. The afflictions rendered in God's name were particularly inspiring.

Take, for example, the Irish conflicts, Catholics against Orangemen. Just the thought of the innocent blood they made flow made his fangs tingle.

No, he was never bored.

 

**Reflections on the New Boy**

Angel watches Buffy give tender looks to her new flame. Her new boy, for that's what he is, a boy. Young, fresh, hopeful. Does she see the future in his eyes?

Angel walked away from her, yet here he is. He knows, wherever this kind of knowledge lives if not in his withered heart, that they two will always be part of one another.

So the pretty young men can come and stay with her, but they can never have her completely. It was Angel she loved and fed and killed.

If he called her name, she'd come to him.

 

**Angel**

He passed the body of the lawyer's wife on his way out. He wondered if her particular hell would be K-Mart shopping and then dinner at Denny's.

He heard screams, faint behind the wine cellar's door. Good. That's what he should have been doing all along. Pitting evil against itself.

It would mean doing a 180. No more trying to save the victims. Go to the source, stamp out the cause. But he needed to be unencumbered. No humans along to slow him down. "Helping the Helpless." What was he thinking? Pitiful.

He slammed the lawyer's front door behind him.

 

**Choices**

In the alley, in the moment after this death, he was offered a hero's reward. He could return in time. This time, Darla would never walk into the hotel. No implausible baby and none of the heartbreak that came after. He'd have a different life.

The past raced through his mind; his soul feeling every bruise life left on it. No Connor? "No," he said to whoever was there. "I want my memories."

"Yet, you stole your friends'."

So he went to a hero's hell, where he was shown the lives his friends would have had, if not for him.

 

**Green**

Maybe a vampire doesn't belong in what's called "Big Sky" country, but times are hard and people here are thin and sinewy with backbreaking work. Not that much of a temptation.

He signs on as a night bartender. No matter how little money there is, some always have enough for booze. "Who's the pasty greenhorn?" they ask the boss. "What'd you care who pours your shot?" he answers. And it's true, they don't.

After closing, Angel hunts with the other predators who seek the small warm-blooded field animals. And like the tired men in the bar hopes for better times.

 

**New York**

He likes the subway tunnels. It's always dark and there are warm-blooded things to eat.

The burden of the soul gets heavier with time, not lighter.

Knowing Spike is here too doesn't help. Luckily, Spike enjoys crowds; he can be watched from the edge of them. The two never meet.

Spike is in his element, blond as Marilyn, dressed like god knows what in leather. Angel hasn't seen his kills, but he's watched the careful stalking. Seen the eager victims smile at Death.

He knows Spike's his masterpiece. Shouldn't Angel feel pleased to see his life's work doing so well?

 

**A Different Outcome**

He peered carefully out the blackened windows. It'd been months since he'd been awake in the daylight. Years since he lived someplace where the sun shone everyday.

He waited for what he was told to look for. The demon in the godawful clothes said that his salvation could be glimpsed here. What he saw were a bunch of girls whose screechy voices gave him a headache.

Then he saw her. The Slayer. Blonder, more perky than the others.   
They wanted him to work with her? He'd rather eat rats.

He drove away. Salvation would have to come some other way.

 

**In China**

Angel saved the baby from Darla. Now he had to save it from himself.

There was a woman who took orphans.

When he went to her, she was packing to leave. "Take this one with you. Please." He wasn't used to asking for things.

"Is he white? I'd never get a Chinese baby out. Well, maybe a girl."

"He's white. Missionary family. They're all dead."

She took the fussing baby from him. She soothed the boy, singing softly, "Hush, little baby." Looking up, she said, "What is his name?"

Angel felt at a loss.

"William," he said. "His name's William."

 

**At Play**

Corrupting the world takes it out of you. So Wolfram &amp; Hart had built their employees an enormous sports center. Finding the bowling alley, Fred just about clapped her hands in glee.

She'd drag others down there to relieve their stress by knocking things down. Even Angel got into it, Fred's enthusiasm being hard to resist. His game started off fine, then he lost his edge. Pins wobbled, seem to be about to fall and then right themselves. Angel's game average plunged.

"This is the best thing about being invisible," thought Spike, grabbing a leaning pin and setting it upright.

 

**Late**

Angel arrived too late. He stood, forbidden to cross the threshold. He watched an unwise old man die.

Kate's father invited death in and a savior had to stand helplessly outside. Angel threatened and growled and slammed against the only shield the humans can have against the evil beyond their doors. It holds while they live.

When the soul was gone, when the body was husk, Angel was released to wreak vengeance. The killers died.

That Angel envied them the blood they drank, that his hands curled in anger but also in longing as he watched them, was his secret.

 

**Light**

When Darla bit him, he saw the light. The one that beckons the dead and is the sinner's salvation. He turned away from it. He embraced walking death and clung tight to it. The light in this woman's eyes would lead him to where he wanted to go, surely.

Now, so much later, in a construct of evil the windows let in Nature's sun. He lies naked on the bed and lets the light bathe and warm him. This is a treat after years in the dark. But he knows it's not Heaven's light.

There is no peace in it.

 

**One Last Thing**

Angel felt as though he had been preparing for this moment for a hundred years. He'd finally gotten the fight he wanted. Good vs. Evil. He'd see, at last, if all the talking everyone had done about being a hero, being a champion meant anything.

He'd given everyone their assignments. Deployed the troops. Now he had a few last minute tasks to do.

He searched in the desk for his fountain pen and best letterhead paper. He'd never taken to computers. One last letter to write:

"To Whom It May Concern:

I found Harmony Kendal to be a conscientious employee..."

 

**Something to Consider**

The road unrolls before him, the car one from his new squadron of shiny toys. He switches on the oldies station and catches a live performance of ol' Blue Eyes in Vegas. He thinks he was in the audience that night.

Vegas was good. All that night life, but he doesn't remember much. He was drunk most of the time. Redemption was just a buzz in the back of his mind.

Back at W&amp;H, issuing orders, signing contracts, he keeps humming Sinatra's "Summer Winds". He doesn't see there are other things to be drunk on besides martinis with a twist.

 

**Midcentury Manhattan**

Madison Avenue types. In the dark corners of the smoky bars that Angel does his drinking in, he sees them. He hates their Brooks Brothers suits, their briefcases.

He remembers when gin was a working man's refuge, rough-edged and pungent. These guys want it icy and tasteless. They want speared condiments in it that they lift out and gesture with, to make their point. They have important things to say about cigarettes and deodorants and lipstick.

Angel hates their smugness. Their sureness and belief in their world.

Truthfully, he wishes he had their certainty. And some the cars they drive.

 

**Silk, I**

I wanna learn from you. But I don't wanna dress like you.

The old clothes had reeked. Not with sweat. Vampires don't do that. But he hadn't cared if the squirming rat he was biting left blood on him. Didn't care, had never even noticed.

That was done with now. He had new shirts, slacks, jackets. He'd go out looking for redemption, if that was in the cards, in style.

No more running away. Guilt would be faced and, somehow, debts repaid.

He slid silk socks over his feet, slipped his feet into Italian loafers and stood. Ready for anything.

 

**Silk, II**

When he opens the sock drawer and pulls out a pair out, it always gives him a lift in spirit.

Featherweight and soft, the way good silk is, it's elegance, but not the comfort of cotton. If he thought about it, he'd know he always yearned for something more than homey warmth.

Fashion's changed. So many fewer buttons, no ruffles at all. Everything simplified. But silk is always right.

_Silk comes from death. It's the casing of a living thing that's been ripped out and thrown away._

The parallels never occur to him. He just likes the way it feels.


End file.
